Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault, 1926–1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault ultimately rejected these labels, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity.

From Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, 2007, pp xxiii-xxvi; there derived from a chronology compiled by Daniel Defert in Foucault, Dits et écrits, t. 1, 1994, pp 13-64.

1926 Born to Paul-Michel Foucault and Anne-Marie Malapert in Poitiers, France.

Summer, 1946 Entry into the Ecole normale superieure, Paris.

1948 Receives the licence in philosophy from the Sorbonne.

1949 Revises his thesis for the diplôme d'études supérieures in philosophy under one of his cherished mentors, Jean Hippolyte.

1952 Completes the diplôme in psychopathology at the Institut de psychopathologie in Paris; begins teaching in the Faculty of Letters at Lille.

1953 Completes the diplôme in experimental psychology at the Institut; offers a course at the Ecole normale supérieure.

1954 Publishes his first book (a revision of which will later be translated into English as Mental Illness and Psychology) and a long introduction to the French translation of the German existential psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger's Traum und Existenz.

1955 Assumes a post at the University of Uppsala, Sweden; begins three years as the director of the Uppsala Maison de France, an institute for the promotion of French culture.

1962 Befriends the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; gives a manuscript of Birth of the Clinic to his former professor, political theorist Louis Althusser.

1963 Sees the publication of Raymond Roussel and Birth of the Clinic; begins the prodigious research for what will become Les Mots et les choses; encounters the painting that will occupy its first pages, Velásquez's Las Meninas, during a visit to the Prado in Madrid.

1966 With Deleuze, begins work on a French edition of Nietzsche's complete works; sees Les Mots et les choses into print; finds himself labeled a "structuralist" and, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "the last rampart of the bourgeoisie"; departs France in the autumn for a three-year sojourn in Tunisia.

1968 Returns in the aftermath of the student revolts to assume a post at the University of Nanterrre.

1970 Accepts the nomination to a chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the most distinguished of French universities, the Collège de France; visits and lectures in Japan; delivers a version of "What Is an Author?" at SUNY Buffalo.

1971 Has his home serve as the seat of a newly founded prisoners' advocacy group, the Groupe d'information sur les prisons; engages in diverse dialogues with the French Maoists; begins a course on "penal theories and institutions" at the Collège; begins an acquaintance with writer Jean Genet; in the Netherlands, engages in a televised debate with Noam Chomsky.

1973 Visits Montreal and Brazil for the first time; witnesses the broad and enthusiastic reception of I, Pierre Riviere... in France.

1975 Provokes controversy with the publication of Discipline and Punish; visits Berkeley and other California universities; proposes a chair for Roland Barthes at the Collège.

1976 Works with Michelle Perrot and Jean-Pierre Barouh on a reissue of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon; provokes controversy again with the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality.

1978 Inaugurates the theme of governmentality with a course on "security, territory and population" at the Collège; begins to trace the genealogy of sexuality back toward antiquity; visits Iran in the months preceding the revolution, which he initially supports; recovers from the archives and publishes Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B., the case of a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite; marches in favor of the acceptance of Vietnamese refugees into France.

1979 Grants an interview published in the first issue of the first French gay magazine, Le Gai Pied; delivers the Tanner lectures at Stanford.

1980 Delivers the Howison lectures at Berkeley to an overflowing crowd; delivers the James lectures at New York University.

1981 Calls for further support of the Vietnamese; advocates the cause of the Polish Solidarity movement.

1982 With historian Arlette Farge, publishes Le Désordre des familles, a collective commentary on a corpus of "poison-pen letters" recovered from the Bastille archives (English translation by Thomas Scott-Railton, 2016); Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow publish the record of his discussions with American interlocutors during the period as Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.

1983 Delivers the Regent's Lectures at Berkeley in the spring; begins to suffer from persistent respiratory ailments.

The works are in French unless noted. The links following respective editions point to their online versions; where no file format is specified abbreviations stand for digital archives. Links within the wiki are in green.

Introduction à 'Anthropologie' de Kant, [1961], 128 pp, typoscript, HTML. The Introduction, together with his translation of Immanuel Kant's Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), constituted Foucault's secondary doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Jean Hyppolite and submitted to the University of Paris, Sorbonne on 20 May 1961.

"Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View", trans. Arianna Bove, 2004, HTML. (English). Translated as part of Bove's doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex.

The Politics of Truth, [1978-84], ed. Sylvère Lotringer, intro. John Rajchman, trans. Lysa Hochroth & Catherine Porter, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, PDF. (English) A collection of lectures and essays on Kant: a lecture given to the French Society of Philosophy on 27 May 1978; the essay "For an Ethics of Discomfort" (1979); two Dartmouth College lectures given on 17 and 24 Nov 1980 (repeated in a slightly different version at Berkeley on 20-21 Oct 1980); an interview conducted by André Berten at U Leuven in 1981; a lecture given at the Collège de France (1983); and the essay "What is Enlightenment" (1984).

[Truth & Subjectivity: Howison Lectures], [1980], MP3, MP3. A series of public lectures sponsored by the History Department and French Department on the UC Berkeley campus, given 20-21 October 1980. (English)

"About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth", [1980], Political Theory 21:2 (May 1993), pp 198-227, ARG, PDF. Delivered in English on 17 and 24 November 1980. (English)

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, [1982], eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, 166 pp, PDF. (English). Given at the University of Vermont in autumn 1982.

"Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire", in Homage à Jean Hyppolite, ed. S. Bachelard, et al., Paris: PUF, 1971, pp 145-172, PDF. Along with "Réponse au Cercle d'épistémologie" [67], which became the introductory chapter of The Archaeology of Knowledge, this essay represents Foucault's attempt to explain his relationship to those sources which are fundamental to his development.

with Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, "On the Genealogy of Ethics. An Overview of Work in Progress", in Dreyfus, Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., 1983, pp 229-264, PDF. Result of a series of working sessions conducted at Berkeley in April 1983. (English)

with Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker and Alfredo Gomez-Müller, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom", [1984], trans. J. D. Gauthier, Philosophy & Social Criticism 12 (July 1987), pp 112-131, ARG; repr. in The Final Foucault, eds. James William Bernauer and David M. Rasmussen, MIT Press, 1988, pp 1-20. (English). Given 20 January 1984.

Le foucauldien, Open Library of Humanities, since 2017. Open access journal, a spin-off from the academic weblog foucaultblog, which was founded by a group of humanities scholars at the University of Zurich in 2013. (English),(German),(French)